


i'm not a betting man (but this is a sure thing)

by endquestionmark



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-08 01:26:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16419803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: Eddie wakes up half-hard on a Saturday and thinks,Oh, fuck.





	i'm not a betting man (but this is a sure thing)

**Author's Note:**

> When I started writing this, I told myself that if it hit an arbitrary wordcount, I would publish it, no ifs, ands, or buts. About three hundred words before that wordcount, I started to get nervous. That impulse was correct.

Eddie wakes up half-hard on a Saturday and thinks, _Oh, fuck._

He has days like this sometimes, when he comes to consciousness slowly and pleasantly, face pressed against his pillow and hips pressed against the mattress, body already primed for — and demanding — attention. The sun slants through the windows, perfect for a lazy early-morning orgasm, and Eddie stretches against its warmth, enjoying the novelty of being present and immersed in sensation.

For the most part, Eddie doesn’t pay too much attention to his body. He feeds it Cup Noodles when it gets hungry, washes it when people start avoiding him in the newsroom kitchenette, and occasionally buys it new clothes when he can’t get to the laundromat on a weeknight and the alternative is going to work in boxers and mismatched socks. Eddie and his body have an arrangement worked out: Eddie tries not to fall down too many flights of stairs or develop scurvy, and in exchange his body will live on hummus and stale pita chips for up to a week. When days like this come along, Eddie spends a leisurely morning in bed, jerks off until his refractory period gives out, dozes through the afternoon, and then goes back to ignoring his body until the next time rolls around. He has a routine. It works. It’s practically reflexive.

_Eddie._

“Oh, fuck!” Eddie says, out loud this time as he jolts directly to consciousness, and buries his face in his arms. “Shitfucking Christ,” he adds, and then invents a few expletives for good measure, and thinks, _Fuck,_ to himself again — because obviously things are different now, and he never considered that they might be, and now he has to figure out how to get off, at least once, in the body he shares with an alien symbiote who feels what he feels, and who can’t spend too much time outside of its host — that thought makes Eddie shiver, for reasons he’s determined not to examine — and whose voice rumbles through his mind like thunder, on a good day. Distant heat-lightning thunder, from a storm close enough that it might still turn.

Since it isn’t a good day, Venom’s voice rumbles through Eddie’s body, too, which is a little more than Eddie is equipped to deal with. It feels like the rumble of his bike, crossing the bridge at top speed, or the prelude to a really good fuck, and that’s the last straw. Eddie forces himself upright and out of bed, dignity be damned, trips over his shoes, and then stumbles into the bathroom, turns on the cold tap at full force, and shoves his head underneath.

Their joint scream is still echoing off the walls as Eddie dries himself off and looks blankly at the water splattered all over the sink and cabinets. _This might as well happen_ , he thinks, and wipes his towel halfheartedly through the puddles. “Good morning,” he says, because it seems like the thing to do.

_Is this customary?_ Venom enquires. _We have not done this before._ Eddie swings the towel at his own face, not as lightly as he hopes. “Yes,” he says, because sometimes bullshit is the best defense. He scrubs at the faint, stinging mark and contemplates shaving for approximately a third of a second, then gives it up for another day. He tries to think of a distraction, and fails miserably, mind instantly blank, for a nerve-straining minute before a beautiful, blessed thought comes to him. “What do you want to eat?”

_Kidneys!_ “No kidneys. Eggs.” _Eggs and kidneys?_ Venom sounds hopeful, and Eddie looks at himself in the mirror. He feels like a monster, not because he’s eaten more than a dozen people in the last month but because he’s saying no to the alien who wants to start the day off by eating yet another. His life is, somehow, just as strange as he expected, but a lot stupider, and much less photogenic. Eddie considers hitting himself with the towel again to give himself an excuse. Even if he’s being generous, he looks like absolute shit: barely conscious enough to form facial expressions, sallow from hitting a week of late deadlines, and the hollows under his eyes might as well be chiseled out. “Eggs and bacon.”

_Bacon._ Eddie enjoys the novelty of a meditative pause inside his own mind, and prays for agreement. _Bacon!_

“Bacon,” he says, and thinks, _Thank God,_ because nothing is less sexy than splatter burns, and nothing is more distracting than breakfast. If Eddie tries, he can almost ignore the way his body is singing out, the faint tinnitus whine of arousal lingering in his nerve endings, like faint summer lightning. _It’s practically nothing_ , he tells himself. _It’s perfectly manageable._

_I’m great at managing things_ , Eddie tells himself, and does it so well he almost believes it.

 

* * *

 

He hopes that it’ll get better overnight, and it doesn’t; Eddie wakes up on Sunday with a dry mouth from the noises he finds himself making, legs tangled in the sheets, dick at a generous three-quarters mast, and nearly falls over himself trying to make it into a cold shower before Venom says anything. When Eddie is conscious enough to look down, he realizes that he’s still wearing his socks, but his libido is still tentatively hopeful, so he stands in the shower for another ten minutes while his feet gradually become sodden — just for good measure.

When he gets out of the shower, his feet squish on the shower mat, and even that isn’t enough to fully kill his hard-on. Eddie begins to wonder if he’ll die like this — aroused, humiliated, and wearing one clothing item he didn’t expect. There are probably worse ways to go, but Eddie knows his luck too well to count on an easy exit. Someone would probably save him at the last minute, and then recognize him from his show, and want an autograph, and then Eddie would actually have to die just to avoid dealing with the consequences.

He briefly considers going back to bed, but that might just make matters worse, and besides, Venom is probably awake now. Eddie doesn’t know whether the symbiote sleeps, or what Venom does when Eddie is sleeping, whether their metabolisms slow down in sync or whether Venom simply finds something else to do when Eddie is unconscious. If the former, Eddie wonders what an extraterrestrial symbiotic lifeform might dream about, whether it would be the stars or something else entirely, beyond human comprehension. If the latter, Eddie wonders how Venom fills the hours from midnight to the first glimmer of light in the sky. Eddie thinks of those as the lonely hours, a stretch of time where it seems like the world might have forgotten about him, and when it seems like he might get left behind in the past, a day behind, as the sun rises for everyone else.

He has a lot of time to wonder about these kinds of things while he’s wringing ice water out of his socks, the least sexy activity possible — which solves one of his problems and creates about fifteen more. First and foremost, his towel is on the other side of the room; second, Venom is certainly awake and present, and none too happy to experience near-hypothermia so early in the day.

_Cold!_ Venom shouts, loud enough that Eddie reflexively tries to cover his ears, convinced that there must be some way to lower the volume. “Sorry,” he says, although he isn’t; mostly, he’s disgruntled and beginning to feel the sharp edge of desperation, because if he doesn’t figure out a solution by the end of the day he’ll have to make it through an entire week before he gets another weekend. Which is fine, Eddie reminds himself; it’s fine. He can make it. He’s done worse. That’s another perk of being a journalist, let alone one sharing a body with a goo blob from space: Things could always be worse.

Eddie spends the rest of his Sunday doing laundry, uncharacteristically, in search of a pair of clean, dry socks, and doing his best to figure out some kind of solution. Eddie went to college once; he’s not too shabby when it comes to figuring out ways to jerk off without getting caught, but even his freshman self might have had some trouble figuring out a way around his current situation. He could ask Venom to give him a few hours by himself, but he can’t think of an explanation that would work — _oh yeah, it’s a human thing_ — and he doesn’t want to lie to Venom, for whatever reason. Call it journalistic ethics. The thought just doesn’t sit right with Eddie; it would be like lying to someone who has implicit, utter trust in him. Eddie’s done enough of that in his life. (Anne’s box of paperwork thuds to the ground at his feet all over again.)

The alternatives aren’t great, though. Eddie supposes he could strap an icepack to his dick for a week, but he doesn’t find that thought particularly appealing, just as much as he doesn’t love the thought of never jerking off again.

There’s a last possibility, one that Eddie tries not to look at too closely, because he knows himself, and he knows that his impulse control is so minuscule it may as well not exist. But it whispers at the back of Eddie’s mind nevertheless, a voice he knows well from a hundred lucky guesses and a thousand more unlucky ones: He could throw caution to the winds, say _fuck it_ and see what happens.

He could, but it’s only been a few months. He’s still getting the hang of this bodily cohabitation thing; he can only imagine Venom is, as well. It seems a little early to introduce — whatever he would be introducing. Sex? Masturbation? There isn’t really a linguistic convention when it comes to having any kind of sex in a shared body. _Get fucked, AP style,_ Eddie thinks. _Bet you never thought of this._

AP style isn’t the problem, though, and neither is Eddie’s persistent erection; the real issue is that Eddie has spent a non-negligible amount of time thinking about it of his own volition. Not on purpose, for the most part, just in the idle way that he sometimes looks at someone and thinks, _Oh._ A woman with sharp-cut hair and an aura of pen-clicking; a man with the right kind of get-lost smile; Eddie hasn’t felt like this since he was a teenager, clumsy with lust and awkward in his own body, looking at random people and wondering, idly, how they like to fuck. What it would be like.

It’s a little different when Eddie entertains those thoughts about the entity that lives in his body, that shares space with his organs, but not by much. So he wonders, sometimes, when he can’t sleep, or when he’s awake but not caffeinated, in those hazy headspaces where reality’s parameters don’t quite exist. He wonders how much Venom would be able to feel, what it would be like to have that voice echoing in his mind, what sounds they might make; he wonders whether Venom has ever encountered anything analogous to human sex, and he wonders whether he can even imagine how symbiotes fuck, if they do. He wonders if Venom would be passive, just along for the ride, or take an active hand in matters.

Eddie wonders if thinking about it is going to help or hurt, and then he goes right back to wondering, self-preservation be damned.

By Monday morning, Eddie thinks he might have given himself some kind of sex-fixation flu. He’s running warm, and sensitive all over; he thinks he might be coming down with a fever. He considers calling into work, and doesn’t.

Eddie’s editor, Murphy, takes one look at him when he walks into the office and says, “I will send you home if you sneeze _once_ , do you understand? _Once._ ”

“I’m not sick,” Eddie says, and narrowly avoids running straight into a filing cabinet as he power-walks away. It’s a win-win situation: If he is sick, he gets to take Murphy down with him, and if he isn’t, well, then he gets to be right.

“ _No warnings!_ ” Murphy yells in the distance.

Eddie makes it all the way to his desk before anyone else interrupts, and then:

_You’re not sick,_ Venom says.

“I know.” Eddie shuffles some trash from one side of his desk to the other side; one of the few benefits of working in a newsroom is that nobody looks twice at somebody talking to himself.

_But something is different. Are you hungry? It feels like you might be hungry._

“I’m not hungry,” Eddie says, although he always is, these days, just a little. He looks at squirrels and thinks, _I could eat that,_ and then he isn’t sure whose voice is doing the thinking. Once, he ate a hot dog from a street cart on purpose. “I’m just tired.”

_You could sleep,_ Venom suggests. _I could help._

Eddie laughs. “I wish you could.”

_I could._

“You really couldn’t,” Eddie says, and hopes his tone conveys what he really means, which is _Please God stop asking me about this_.

_I bet I could!_

Eddie grits his teeth and does his best not to think _I bet you could_ , just in case Venom is thinking of developing telepathy any time soon, though he supposes it’s a little late to start worrying about that.

By Tuesday, Eddie’s coworkers are actively avoiding him. “Why?” Eddie asks his producer, Tracy, and she gives him a speaking look.

“You’re sweaty.”

“I’m always sweaty,” Eddie says. He’s been sweaty since puberty. One day he’ll slide right into the coffin.

“You’re sweatier than usual,” she says, and starts ticking items off on her fingers. “You’re talking to yourself more than usual. Yesterday you stared into space for three straight hours, and then you went into the supply room and had an incredibly involved conversation with eighteen boxes of pens. This morning, the intern came to give you her notes, and you were so jumpy that she thinks her handwriting might have killed you. You look like you either have scarlet fever or an acute attack of self-consciousness. Also, you ate five pounds of raw chicken for lunch on Monday.”

“Really?” Eddie says. He doesn’t remember that.

She shrugs. “You put them in the fridge in the morning and we were all like, sure, because we all leave groceries in there sometimes. And then Brian from the copy desk found the empty package in the kitchen trash, so, you know, I guess you could have done something else with them, but either way it doesn’t look great, you know?”

A huge part of journalism, in Eddie’s experience, involves making an ass of himself in public: asking stupid questions, going viral from incredibly unflattering angles, getting caught at his desk with three weeks’ worth of unfinished frozen lunches and enough sticky notes to wallpaper a small room. So yeah, he does know what “not great” looks like. He also knows that journalism is incredibly masturbatory — a phrase he’s been trying to avoid, at least recently — and staffed entirely by people whose only transferable skill is the ability to badger others into revealing highly personal and embarrassing information. It’s the perfect storm.

“You don’t know what I do with my chicken,” he says, and Venom rumbles out a laugh in the back of his mind.

Tracy considers that for a brief moment. “And I’m happy about that,” she says, and leaves him — finally — in peace.

_It was dead,_ Venom says, mournfully. Eddie tries not to think about eating raw chicken with his hands next to the coffee machine.

“It was that or the intern.” _The intern!_ “No! I was kidding! That was a joke!” _Oh._

Eddie rubs his forehead. “We’ve really got to work on humor,” he says.

_Now?_

The worst part is that Eddie actually wants to say yes. He wants to throw his deadlines to the wind and leave his unread voicemails blinking on his work phone and consign himself to an all-nighter later so that he can head to the supply closet, or maybe the mail room, and spend a good hour or two of his day explaining irony and sarcasm to Venom — who already has a fairly good grasp of morbid humor — for no better reason than that it sounds like the best possible use of his afternoon.

Eddie can’t imagine a more worthwhile use for his time. He felt the same way about Anne once, which is a jarring thought. Eddie can still feel the sharp edges, blunter than they once were, of the space Anne occupied in his life, of the person he was when he was with her. Once, Eddie blew off morning meetings to get breakfast with Anne at the diner down the street. Now, Eddie considers ruefully, he blows deadlines in order to hang out in the mail room with the alien lump of chewed gum that lives in his body, in the spaces between molecules, between layers of tissue. Now, instead of trying to live like a competent adult, he makes time to teach Venom what it means to live among humans, and Venom listens.

Sometimes, Eddie wonders if he could feel that way about Anne again — if he had enough time; if she wasn’t so happy with Dan; if he wasn’t the right choice for her; if Eddie hadn’t made so many mistakes; if he didn’t spend so much time with Venom. His train of thought usually stops there, interrupted by thoughts like _I wonder if Venom has ever been to the zoo_ , and then, _We could go to the zoo._

Eddie lives with uncertainty all the time. It’s part and parcel of living according to the news cycle, waking up every day with no idea what he’ll be asked to cover by the time he goes home that night. He’s used to not knowing. He’s used to speculating, too: What if this parameter changes, what if it changes at a specific time, what if it changes in a specific way. What if he hadn’t opened that email; what if he hadn’t gone off half-cocked in the middle of that interview; what if he hadn’t stood in the middle of the bridge, eyes only for the story on the other side, with no thought of falling, and then thrown himself without hesitation from a ledge of an entirely different variety.

Certainty is much less familiar. Eddie is used to not knowing, has spent years learning to live with it. He isn’t used to being sure — finding his personal axis. Eddie remembers being five years old and stuffed with caramel corn and ice cream at an amusement park, and he remembers the way he stumbled when he got off the tilt-a-whirl, unaccustomed to solid ground. He wonders if Venom feels the same way, adjusting to Earth’s gravity and rotation after hurtling through space on a comet: newborn and ungainly, thrown off-balance. Maybe that was why Eddie was a perfect host. Maybe that shared knowledge, that mutual mutual alienation from the everyday, is worth the time Eddie makes for it. Maybe he can afford to spend an afternoon hashing out the finer points of humor in the storage closet.

“Sure,” he says. “Why not?”

_Yes!_ Venom cheers, and Eddie, despite himself, smiles.

 

* * *

 

The storage closet is what gets him, ironically — Eddie is the only person in the office, short of the newsroom’s terrifying, dictatorial office manager, who spends any time in there on purpose, and after three straight days of hiding out and discussing Earth customs with Venom to avoid thinking about his spectacularly blue balls, he finds out why.

“Jesus!” Murphy says, opening the door and squinting through the cloud of dust that rises as a result. “Are you living in here?”

Eddie just shrugs. At this point, there’s no point trying to convince Murphy that he’s a sane, reasonable human adult; he may as well lean into it. Murphy has already fired Eddie once, maybe twice — there are a few office happy hours that Eddie can’t quite remember, so he can’t rule it out — and they have no pretense left for each other.

“No wonder you look so crappy,” Murphy says, right on cue.

“You’re a terrible, terrible boss,” Eddie says, a little fondly.

“It’s full of fucking dust in here!” Murphy runs a finger along the nearest shelf. “Are you nuts?”

Eddie shrugs. “Dust doesn’t bother me.”

_Yes it does,_ Venom says.

“It doesn’t bother you? Jesus,” Murphy says again. “Do you just… live like this?”

Eddie takes a breath to respond, and then sneezes three times in quick succession.

“It was the dust!” he yells, just as Murphy’s glare goes laser-focused. “You said it yourself!”

“You know what else I said?”

“You say a lot,” Eddie mutters, and Murphy snaps.

“No warnings!”

Venom snickers in the back of Eddie’s head all the way home, and by the time Eddie flips down the kickstand on his bike and stomps upstairs, he’s both furious and blindingly hard — call it adrenaline, call it stress, call it the realization that he may never have an orgasm again. It isn’t his favorite combination, but what can he do about it? Drink the last beer in the fridge? Eddie stares at the expired carton of eggs and rotten orange juice, and then decides that he isn’t above that.

_Eddie_ , Venom says, halfway down the bottle. Eddie feels significantly less bad, if barely tipsy. He rolls the cap between his fingers.

“Mm,” he says.

_I’m not stupid, Eddie._

Eddie laughs at that, because it’s true. Venom has seen more than he ever will, and understands more about his place in the universe than he could ever imagine. Eddie knows a lot about a few things: which publicists he can harass without getting sued, and for how long, how much garbage he can leave in his apartment before vermin start moving in, how to get Mrs. Chen to stop asking after his health so pointedly that she almost definitely means it as an insult. But he’s also aware of how little he knows in any meaningful sense.

On the other hand, Venom thinks that an intern is a kind of prepackaged snack, and if any vermin tried moving into Eddie’s apartment, the symbiote would probably consider it a technological advancement on par with Postmates. There’s a long list of subjects where Venom is playing catch-up: personal space, the specific definition of and moral objections to cannibalism, proportionate responses to stressful situations, and subtlety, to name a few. They’re both morons, in their own ways.

_I know what’s going on,_ Venom says, and Eddie just laughs harder and takes another swig of beer.

“Okay, man.”

They sit in silence for a moment. More and more, Eddie has difficulty thinking of Venom as a separate being; he knows that they only share a body, really, not a mind, but the distinctions are a little fuzzier now than they once were. Humans find common ground through shared experience; Eddie shares every experience with Venom. They look through the same eyes and wear the same skin. They share meals and oxygen. They have the same heartbeat. More and more, Eddie finds himself thinking in terms of _we_ , not _him_ or _it_ or _they_ — a united front.

Eddie has never been the type to do things halfway; he moved in with Anne three months after they started dating, and had every intention of spending the rest of his life with her, wearing button-down shirts to formal dinners and someday trading in his bike for a sedan. He wanted to share worlds and lives; he wanted to think of them as a _we_ , as well. But he can’t imagine having the same kind of intimacy with anyone else, now, just as much as he can’t imagine what it would be like to be the only occupant of his body again, to unknit his days from Venom’s, to lose that. To understand it as a loss.

On the other hand, to share their time, to discover his new parameters of self as the symbiote does the same: Eddie’s traitor heart settles into a stronger rhythm at the thought.

There’s fog on the horizon. It might roll in later, or it might roll in sooner; either way, Eddie thinks, it’s coming. He says as much, out loud, and then falls back into silence, running his thumb along the side of the beer bottle, collecting condensation and scraping the label off with his nail.

_You don’t have to suffer_ , Venom says, a little lower and quieter than usual, but no less intense.

“Alright,” Eddie says, and puts the beer down, because Venom could have arrived at any number of wrong answers, and he wants to get ahead of whatever horrific suggestion is about to rumble through his mind. Because whatever is going to happen will happen whether or not he stalls; because he wants to find out what it is. Because he wants to stop fucking about on the ledge, playing games with gravity, and jump. “What’s going on, then?”

_You don’t believe that I know?_

“I think you might not know what you’re talking about.”

_I could show you._

Fog rolling in, sinking the city, billowing up: Eddie is familiar with the tension in the air, the building inevitability, but he isn’t sure. He isn’t sure, and he has to be sure, and if he’s being honest, he wants to hear it in Venom’s voice, resonating along every fiber of his being, echoing in his bones. He wants to know, and he also wants, plain and simple. “Tell me first.”

_You need — release._

It’s like misjudging the height of a staircase, and coming up against the ground sooner than expected. Faced with solid ground, Eddie stumbles, and suddenly everything is significant; everything is real.

“Well, fuck me,” he says, still searching for his balance. “Yeah, I guess you did know what you were talking about.”

_I understand,_ Venom says. _In some ways, we are not so different. In this, we are, but I understand._

Venom falls silent, but not absent. It’s the kind of pause that drives Eddie to do wild things, to move cities, quit jobs, jump out of planes, just so that something happens to break the tension. The same nervy edge lurks in Eddie’s mind: urgent and instinctive, something far beyond rational thought and much closer to fight or flight. But Eddie doesn’t want to fight or flee; he wants to make the first move. He wants to leap from high places. He wants to bare his throat, and see what happens.

“I could show _you_ ,” he says, and it’s hard to say whether the emphasis is his or Venom’s, but it’s there nevertheless, a come-on. A dare.

_Jackass,_ Venom says, fondly, but nervous — what a novelty, for the deadly alien presence in Eddie’s head to be the nervous one. Eddie smiles.

“Fuck off,” he says, and leans back on the sofa. Briefly, Eddie considers the merits of moving to his bed; on the one hand, it would be more comfortable. On the other hand, he would need to move half a mattress’ worth of takeout containers, dirty laundry, and half-assed notes for his next column. On the third hand — the symbiote hand? — fucking, or whatever they’re doing, has some ineffable significance in a bed that it doesn’t have on a sofa. Eddie isn’t ready to address whatever that significance is just yet; he sleeps in that bed, and so does Venom, at least by proxy. Eddie doesn’t know how to describe what they are just yet, beyond a shared name and body, the most intimate cohabitation he can imagine. He doesn’t know if he’s ready to find out. “All right,” he says instead, and unbuckles his belt, undoes his fly. “Tell me how this feels.”

_Good,_ Venom says, without hesitation or confusion. Eddie finds himself pressing the heel of his hand down a little harder, rocking up a little more intently than he usually would at this point in the process. _No wonder you enjoy this._

“Right,” Eddie says, trying to suppress shades of David Attenborough —  _here, the journalist, in his natural state, sweaty and horny, pleasures himself for the alleged edification of another, a metaphor for his so-called profession_ — and almost lightheaded with the newness of the sensation. It’s like having sex with someone new for the first time, the same hesitancy, the same sense of discovery, but dialed up to eleven. “Are you doing that?”

_Paying close attention._ Eddie isn’t sure which one of them is driving, but it almost doesn’t matter; he knows what he likes, and Venom is finding out for the first time. They trace the underside of his dick with shared fingertips and gasp with shared lungs; their shared heartbeat speeds up. Eddie feels feverish, almost, acutely aware of the blood rushing through their body and roaring in their ears. _What about something new?_

“New?” Eddie is almost surprised to hear his own voice coming out of his mouth; it should be deeper, all-encompassing. It should shake the room.

_Tell us how this feels._ Eddie gives over his hands, his breath, his body to Venom, and in exchange the symbiote does — something. Lights up every nerve ending in speaking distance of Eddie’s dick, maybe; awakens some area of sensation that he’s never previously explored. There’s an interiority to the heat that spikes through Eddie’s body, the way he starts to ache between his legs, that he can only assume is Venom’s doing.

Eddie isn’t entirely clear on the way the symbiote’s biology has merged with his — whether the way it temporarily changes his body is superficial, or not — but the difference in sensation is profound, and hard to describe. At points, it verges on pain, or perhaps Eddie is just so overstimulated that it’s the only way his brain can process the input; either way, he’s harder than he’s ever been, and making a mess of his boxers. _Off,_ Venom says, and shoves them down Eddie’s legs to join his jeans on the floor. _Better._

Eddie focuses long enough to look down, and finds himself staring. He never thinks of the symbiote as particularly beautiful, but it weaves in and out of his skin, surfaces through his flesh and winds along his cock like a living tattoo before disappearing again.

“God,” Eddie says, because he can’t muster up the brain cells to say, _You’re part of me_ , and what he really means anyway is, _Don’t stop._ He suddenly wants to find out what else the symbiote might be able to do, given free reign; whether Venom could fill him up, keep him on the edge for hours, overtake him entirely with pleasure. A tendril wraps around the head of his cock and slides through the wetness gathered there, quick and teasing, before it vanishes again. Eddie has never seen himself like this, and it’s intoxicating. The symbiote’s oil-slick shimmer is almost obscene against his flushed skin, gathering and circling like magnetic particles.

Some of the sensation must belong to Venom, Eddie realizes, because it feels so different, strung throughout his entire body. Eddie can feel sparks scraping along his spine, and filling up his ribcage; he feels wholly given over to pleasure, made an instrument of release and nothing more, single-minded in purpose. He isn’t thinking in words, just sensation — gathered to leap.

_Yes,_ Venom says, and pins Eddie’s hands to the couch, black woven through his wrists. _Yes?_

“Fuck,” Eddie says, “stop screwing around, yes, please!”

His cock jerks, and Eddie’s entire body twitches with it as he looks down; the symbiote is showing through his skin now, swathes of iridescence rippling across his abdomen, and it’s the hottest thing Eddie has ever seen, the hottest thing his body has ever done — arch and stretch and strain, overwriting all his purpose with urgency and need.

_We thought so_ , Venom says, and Eddie whines, but it sounds different. It sounds rougher, and deeper. _We hoped._

“Oh,” Eddie says, or maybe they both do, and then they say very little, caught up in the rush to what must come next — when their hips jerk up, out of rhythm, and their breathing comes ragged, and tension overwhelms them one last time — and then reflex wins out, and physics take over, and for a moment all Eddie can feel is the wind rushing past his face, and the swoop of gravity.

He comes for a long time, in stops and starts, and each start is so overwhelming that Eddie thinks it must be the last one, and then it isn’t. After a while, he finds himself able to relax, and then the aftershocks hit: quick little jolts of pleasure, with no rhythm or reason.

A while after that, he exhales, and all the muscles in his body go loose and warm.

Some time in the evening, Eddie wakes up, absolutely filthy and sticking to the couch in places. The fog has rolled in for the night, and his apartment is dark; he gets up in search of the light switch and immediately trips over his jeans. Eddie has a brief flash of his obituary — Area Reporter Dies With Cock Out — and then regains his balance by knocking over a lamp.

“Hey,” he says, once the lights are on, and instantly regrets it. What if Venom is having second thoughts and wants some time alone to figure it out? Does texting etiquette still apply in a shared body?

A moment goes by, and then another.

_We liked that._

“Great,” Eddie says. He opens one kitchen cabinet and then another, mostly for something to do. “Great, because I did too.”

_Good._

“Good.”

A long, long moment goes by, and then Eddie says, “We should do that again,” just as the same words rumble through his mind.

_Yes,_ Venom says: a little pleased, a little possessive, thrumming in Eddie’s bones. _We have learned something. Next time, we will learn more._

Eddie shivers. “Yes,” he says, because suddenly he can’t think of anything besides next time, and the time after that. All the times after that, and what they might learn. He wants, very badly, to find out. “What do we want for dinner?”

_We,_ Venom begins, and Eddie holds up one finger.

“No kidneys.”

_No kidneys,_ Venom says. _How about hash browns?_

“See?“ Eddie says. “We’ve learned something already.”

_So we have,_ Venom says, weighting the second word, and Eddie flushes.

“Don’t push it,” he says, and Venom laughs — all the way down the stairs and to the end of the block, into the clouded night, until Eddie can feel it in his own throat, threatening to break loose and spill into the foggy air, through the streets: a shared secret, an inside joke, a world that contains just the two of them, and nobody else. It’s close, Eddie thinks, to happiness.


End file.
